Everything you wanted to know about your next book!

Merchants of Doubt, by Naomi Oreskes & Erik M. Conway

‘That the science was uncertain, that more research was needed, that the economic consequences of controlling … would be too great, and that … might be caused by natural sources’. Sound familiar? Fill in ‘climate change’, and you have a summary of the argument of those who oppose action on global warming. But in this quote from Merchants of Doubt (2010), Oreskes and Conway are putting the argument made by electricity utilities in the US against taking action on acid rain back in the 1980s. And this is their point. Whether it is cigarette smoking, acid rain, the hole in the ozone layer or climate change, the same arguments have been rolled out over and over against taking action. And, very often, they claim, by the same people.

Oreskes’s and Conway’s book traces the actions taken by individuals, industry groups and privately funded think tanks to defend certain positions, such as the right to smoke and the need to install weapons in space (the Strategic Defence Initiative), and to attack attempts to regulate smoking, both active and passive, phase out the use of chlorofluorocarbons, prohibit DDT, and most recently, to control the emission of Co2 into the atmosphere. They argue that strikingly similar tactics have been used in all these cases. These include attacking the science that says the threat is real by emphasising any uncertainties; attacking scientists’ credibility; establishing organisations, most notably the George C. Marshall Institute, to commission and fund alternative research and cultivate scientists to at best research other areas that might be causing the ill effects of, for example, smoking; and cultivating links to politicians, journalists and senior public servants. The authors show how difficult it has been for scientists to gain the same level of public hearing when they seek to correct ‘science’ that has not been peer reviewed, and is not accepted by the vast majority of experts in the area. A letter to Science does not carry the same weight as an editorial in The Wall Street Journal.

Oreske and Conway say that the same names come up surprisingly often – first working with tobacco companies, then denying the reality of acid rain or the hole in the ozone layer. Several of the individuals they discuss had distinguished careers in physics and rocketry in the 1950s, but have done little research since, and none on the areas in which they later chose to comment. The authors suggest that their motivation was probably a fierce anti communism, and a concomitant attachment to the free market economy. Controlling environmental hazards involves regulation by the state, and it seems that this is anathema to them. They have therefore joined with organisations with similar aims, such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Heartland Institute and the Heritage Foundation, to defend what they see as ‘liberty’. They do not acknowledge that the operation of the free market can ever result in market failure as evidenced by human induced climate change.

The authors have done extensive research, in particular in the Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, and each of their case studies is exhaustively footnoted. Occasionally the detail can become a little tedious as they seek to show exactly what happened in this committee or to that report. But I can forgive them this; they are being scrupulous in their scholarship, because they know they are likely to be attacked over it. And overall, it’s an easy, if disturbing read.

Oreske and Conway are historians, not scientists (though Oreskes’s original degree was in geology, and Conway is the historian at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory). Their aim is to recount the history of the attempts to create doubt, not to test the science. They accept that uncertainty and scepticism are fundamental tools of science, but argue for the validity of peer review in establishing what can be called scientific knowledge. They lament what they see as the misuse of the doctrine of journalistic ‘balance’ which gives equal time to the few who doubt the scientific conclusions of the vast majority of working scientists, and to those that accept them. I think they let the media off a bit lightly on this, seeing it as an attempt to be fair, rather than the result of laziness or vested interest.

What they have shown is that doubt works. And their suggested antidote of a public informed about what is good science and what is rubbish seems over-optimistic. But in the absence of anything else, read the book and apply the history it outlines to the debates that fill our media today. I particularly like the quote they use from Isaiah Berlin –‘liberty for wolves means death to lambs’.

You can read more about the book here, including an attack on it by the Marshall Institute. You can see Professor Oreskes answering climate sceptics here.

Related

2 Responses

Darryl – excellent work.I find the whole crrootvensy sadly amusing – sad because the effects are so important, amusing because of the contortions of thinking that happen.One of the contortions comes to play when deniers talk about all of the money that might come into play if carbon trading takes off or if renewable energy mandates get passed. They also imply that climate scientists have sold their souls for research grants.They completely ignore the amount of money already controlled by industries that together dump about 30 billion tons of waste products into the atmosphere every year without charge. It is hard to get one’s mind around the huge numbers involved – ExxonMobil, a company that controls just 3-4% of the global market for hydrocarbons, sold $440 BILLION worth of product last year and made more than $40 billion in after tax, after generous depletion allowance PROFIT. (The company’s free cash flow was more than $100 billion.) That is only one of many sources of funds for anyone willing to produce research that denies reality.I was also amused to see a comment from a geologist who criticized your work and called into question the whole field of climate science. While I am reluctant to denigrate an entire branch of science, I’d like to point out that more than 80% of the professional geologists in the world make their living by providing information to the coal, oil and gas extraction industries. Some geologists may study rocks and sediment because those topics fascinate them; most of them study rocks and sediment in order to find the valuable products that their employers sell into the world fossil fuel market.It is also worth thinking about the role of the advertiser supported media in shaping public opinion. How many ads do you think you see on a weekly basis from BP, ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and minors like Citgo, Hess, Valero, etc.? Why do you think you need to turn to a publication like the New Yorker to find a good, penetrating article about the role of fossil fuel money in the climate change discussion? Though the ads that the petroleum industry runs do not deny climate change directly, I am certain that the money they spend has the ability to make journalists reluctant to do hard hitting exposes on their activities in supporting deniers and skeptics.Finally, the other thing that sadly amuses me is that there is a capable, abundant, affordable emission-free alternative to burning coal, oil and natural gas. Nuclear energy has proven itself in the most challenging energy applications as a better than oil source of heat. That energy source really complicates the discussion since many of the people who are reflexively opposed to big oil, coal and gas try to put nuclear energy into the same category. It really confuses them to realize that the science supports the reality that fission is safe, clean and cheap – if you do not let fossil fuel inspired regulators make it too hard and too expensive. It is really amusing to see how some people on the left think that Amory Lovins is on their side when he tries to tell us that all we need is conservation, wind and solar. None of those sources has any hope of harming the market power of the fossil fuel industry or making a dent in the amount of CO2 dumped each year.Nuclear fission, on the other hand, already makes a difference and could make a huge difference if some of the restrictions were lifted.